Where Did “Homeland” Go Wrong?

The culmination of the third season of the generally respected TV series “Homeland” has been so unfulfilling, anticlimactic, and in some ways offensive that I’ve been going back to figure out where the series went wrong. Here be spoilers, so those offended at the prospect should stop reading now.

“Homeland” is an inventive twist on the old conceit of the top-notch detective whose instincts are almost always right—but who, in the face of sometimes ornately ginned-up events, is exposed again and again as someone who just can’t play by the rules. The twist here is that our hero, a C.I.A. agent named Carrie, played by Claire Danes, is bipolar. She finds that the pills she takes to ameliorate the condition weaken her analytical powers; but, of course, without them her behavior becomes erratic, and she has a job in which, understandably, this causes problems for both her and her mentor Saul, played with delicious probity by Mandy Patinkin.

Carrie’s improbable love interest is Brody, a Marine who, before the first season began, was captured and brainwashed by a terrorist mastermind. Back in the U.S., he is seen murdering several people (including the Vice-President!) and almost perpetrates a major terrorist attack. In the end, he balks, and in the time since has been seeking some kind of redemption. Season Two ended with a devastating bombing of the C.I.A. headquarters; Brody became a suspect and went on the run.

This season has expanded the show’s focus to an unfortunate degree. Its dense, almost Grand Guignol plotting has become relaxed and languid. We follow Brody to a hideout in Caracas. This turns out to be inside an abandoned high-rise that has spawned a makeshift society (possibly inspired by a story in this magazine). For Brody, it morphs into a prison where he is beaten and, ultimately, hooked on heroin. A second digression has to do with Brody’s daughter who, we learn, has attempted suicide after the revelations about her father came out. We see her in a psych ward for kids, and watch her as she bonds with a boy in the ward. They couple up and ultimately take an unauthorized joyride to Vermont.

These very long, tedious story lines never go anywhere, literally. We are given to understand that Brody was directed to Caracas by Carrie, but I was never clear on whose authority he was made a prisoner there. In any case, one of the show’s main characters was placed in a dead end. Brody’s daughter and her boyfriend never get anywhere, either. Nothing against the actress Morgan Saylor, she of the trembling lip, who plays Brody’s daughter, but I’d much rather be spending time with Mandy Patinkin.

In the end, as we found out, this was all to distract us from a narrative sleight-of-hand that Saul and Carrie were cooking up. When John le Carré concocted such maneuvers, we saw the characters’ machinations but didn’t understand their intent. “Homeland,” by contrast, just did it all off-screen, and I can’t be the only viewer who felt misled, as opposed to misdirected, when it all was revealed.

In the overheated “24,” the hero, played by Kiefer Sutherland, would find himself being tortured once or twice an episode; physical abuse is de rigueur these days. “Homeland,” however, is paced more calmly and is much less of a cartoon. The abuse that its two main characters undergo is much rougher going: Carrie is subjected to electroshock therapy, and is later shot; Brody is tortured and put through heroin withdrawal.

But it is never clear what it all means. Carrie’s outrageous behavior comes out of an archetypal character that we all understand. Brody is something different. It’s taboo to say it in regular political discourse, but many of the heroes that we salute for serving their country and suffering terribly for it, are, in another sense, victims. Brody certainly is one. Once he successfully re-demonstrated his loyalty to the country, the show’s creators had the opportunity to explore this dichotomy. We know our heroes suffer; but to what lengths will we go to give them the forgiveness they deserve?

The show’s writers faced the same problem with Brody that, in effect, faces a country obsessed with the terrorist bugaboo. Could any public figure shake the hand of a reformed terrorist? How could Brody and Carrie continue their relationship together? How could she work for the C.I.A. and be involved with such a tarnished figure?

Instead, Brody, already physically and psychologically tortured, was martyred, in the most unappetizing recent scene on television that I can think of. The production values of the outdoor-hanging scene were weak—it looked stagey—and the emotional degradation it contained was beyond unpleasant. To make the tableau even bleaker, we are made to watch Carrie as she witnesses her lover’s face contort as he was asphyxiated, dangling from a crane. The overtones of crucifixion only increased the crudeness of the scene.

Brody’s death was sad and pointless. His story arc magnified one of the show’s underlying problems. Danes is a compelling, if somewhat quirky, screen presence; Brody, as played by Damien Lewis, is a cipher. “Star power” is a subjective quality, but to me Lewis lacks obvious oomph, and his Brody was never really limned with any personality or depth by the writers of “Homeland.” All that was left, given his back story, was an outline of a once-strong, but now psychologically disabled man. The show’s occasional attempts to add pathos to his condition—I’m thinking, for example, of an uncomfortable scene in the first season that chronicled his first intimate moment with his wife after eight years in captivity—never went anywhere. (He and Carrie, however, boffed enthusiastically.)

So many other plot turns this season were bumpy. An Iranian spymaster is introduced as an unspeakably psychopathic killer; by the end of the season, he’s an avuncular professional. Similarly, the brutish senator who displaced Saul as the head of the agency becomes Carrie’s new B.F.F. in the finale. Carrie’s predilection for going off the reservation was taken to absurd lengths. But that doesn’t stop her superiors from putting her in a position, again and again, to do the same damn thing. Brody’s redemption—assassinating Iran’s top spy chief—is plotted with utter preposterousness. And then there’s Carrie’s pregnancy, an unnecessary plot point that served only to highlight Brody’s Christ-like sacrifice.

And finally, to describe the final scene as anticlimactic is to torture the word. There is no dramatic plot twist or cliffhanger. The setting is a memorial to honor the C.I.A. employees who’d died in the explosion the year before. This wan conclusion only points out a personal plot hole: I still don’t know who executed the bombing at the C.I.A. (Brody’s car, you’ll remember, was moved by someone on the agency grounds.) The very best series in this wonderful TV age are pleasurable, in part, because we learn to trust their creators; we know that we are in good hands, and that, in the long run, our questions will be answered. In Season Three, “Homeland” slid perceptibly out of that category.

Photograph by Didier Baverel/Showtime.

Bill Wyman is the former arts editor of Salon and National Public Radio.